Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Happy Halloween

I don't think a Halloween has gone by when I didn't dress up. Well, maybe in college (but why not??).

A couple of years ago I was a pirate and looked like Johnny Depp. Last year a plastic surgeon (surgeon's aqua costume, wrapped plastic wrap about my head, waist.....). This year a repeat of the silver siren with a black wig, silver makeup, black and silver big drapey costume with a high collar. (I'll post a pic tomorrow.)

When I was a kid, I'd start trick or treating three days before Halloween. My mother would drive me. We’d begin with the far reaches of the neighborhood. I had three costumes, one for each night.

People would open their front doors and look at their watches, look at each other and say, Is it Halloween??

Just about, I’d say.

They mostly gave me money and apples. I didn’t know that you should confine Halloween to just one night and apparently neither did my mother.

3 comments:

I've had many fun Halloween costumes. As a kid, two friends and I were the Peanuts gang and we made our own dog house and walked from house to house carrying the dog house from the inside, if you can imagine. Then in college, another two friends and I went as Crayola crayons and we walked around in a Crayola crayon box, which was fun until our beers kicked in and made walking side-by-side in a box all the more difficult. Again in college, I was the Fruit-of-the-Loom grapes and my grapes were squeezed all night on an outdoor 'mall crawl'. Halloween is a blast!!

When I was a kid in the 60s I lived in public housing. Halloween was always real life horror.

Now, as a parent of 3 teenage boys we don't do make believe gruesome and horror. I've converted our Halloween to silly - the goofier the better! I love that my boys can comb the neighborhood for simple fun and not have to hide from mobs of real life zombied children deeply damaged by poverty and political injustice.

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About Barbara

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is author of the bestselling and award-winning Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within (Harcourt, 2004), which is now in its 8th printing. She has a short story, "Crazy for You," in Orange County Noir, published by Akashic Books (2010) and an essay, "Knitting, My Urban Escape," in Knitting Through It (Voyageur, 2008). She hosts and produces Writers on Writing, which airs Weds. at 9 a.m. Pacific on KUCI-FM 88.9 in Orange Co., Ca, and streams live at www.kuci.org